Turkic Transliteration

Try it: https://huggingface.co/spaces/AustinWagner/turkic-transliteration-demo

(This repo is the deployment source for that demo. The Space's card lives at .github/hf-space/README.md; a push to main writes it, app.py and the pinned requirement onto the Space. This README used to carry a second copy of that card, which is how the Space came to install a Gradio the package no longer accepted.)

Deterministic Latin and IPA transliteration for Turkic languages, plus helper utilities for corpus building, tokenizer/LM training, and Russian-token filtering.

The design decision worth noting: languages are discovered dynamically from rule files in src/turkic_translit/rules/, so adding a language means adding a .rules file — no code change, and the CLI, the library API (to_ipa/to_latin) and the web demo all pick it up at once.

Supported languages (verified by the test suite): Azerbaijani, Finnish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkish, Uyghur, and Uzbek (both Cyrillic and Latin input). IPA output is available for all of them; Latin output covers Kazakh and Kyrgyz (Cyrillic → Latin, with optional embedded Arabic-script handling) and Turkish (diacritic folding to ASCII).

Install

Python 3.10–3.14, whichever platform: pyicu-wheels publishes the ICU extension for all of them.

pip install turkic-translit
turkic-translit web          # or any of the commands below

Nothing else: ICU arrives with it. That was not true before 0.5.6 — PyICU publishes no wheels on any platform, so an install had to compile against ICU headers, and this project shipped a Windows wheel fetcher to work around it. The dependency is pyicu-wheels, which publishes the same extension prebuilt for Linux, macOS and Windows.

To work on the project rather than use it:

git clone https://github.com/wagner-austin/turkic_transliteration.git
cd turkic_transliteration
pip install -e .[dev]        # or: python scripts/setup_dev.py
turkic-translit web

Optional extras: dev (ruff, mypy, pytest) · examples (Flask, Streamlit, JupyterLab) · sentry (error reporting).

Package names

• Import path: turkic_translit
• PyPI distributable: turkic-translit
• Primary CLI entry point: turkic-translit

Development

The Makefile wraps the common tasks (all via Poetry):

make check   # lint + test (the full gate)
make lint    # guards, then ruff check --fix + ruff format, then strict mypy
make guard   # just the guard rules (scripts/guards/)
make test    # pytest with 100% statement+branch coverage enforced
make web     # launch the Gradio web UI

On Windows without GNU Make: ./scripts/run.ps1 <target>.

Linting, type-checking (strict mypy) and the guard rules all cover src, tests and scripts. The guards ban weak typing (Any, casts, ignores), silent exception handling, and weak or fake tests — including transliteration tests that never compare output against an expected value.

Validation

• Every IPA rule file declares its source in machine-readable # Source-* header fields, and a test module that pins expected output must name the source it inherits (INHERITS_SOURCE); both are guard-enforced, as is the ban on expectations computed by the code under test.
• Expected values are transcriptions printed in the cited descriptions (journal Illustrations, reference-grammar chapters). Each language is covered letter-exhaustively plus word sets from a second, independent description; Uyghur is additionally checked against the MFA dictionary's 22,630 pronunciations.
• Departures from a source's printed notation are declared in two tables — NOTATION (different glyph, same phoneme) and DECLARED_SIMPLIFICATIONS (a real distinction the rules drop) — each entry carrying a reason. A central test fails any entry no printed datum exercises, and a cross-language test requires shared letters to agree across languages after corpus harmonization unless a contrast is declared with a citation.

Command-line tools

Console entry points defined in pyproject.toml:

turkic-translit translit usage

turkic-translit translit --lang kk --in text.txt \
    --out-latin kk_lat.txt --out-ipa kk_ipa.txt --arabic

• --lang — any code advertised by the rules directory; IPA is available for az, fi, kk, ky, tr, ug, uz and uzc (Uzbek Cyrillic)
• --in — input file, or - for stdin (default: -)
• --out-latin — Latin output path, or - for stdout. Omit to skip. Only meaningful for languages with <lang>_lat.rules (kk, ky, tr).
• --out-ipa — IPA output path, or - for stdout. Omit to skip.
• --arabic — also transliterate embedded Arabic script (Latin mode only)
• --benchmark — log throughput statistics on completion

At least one of --out-latin / --out-ipa must be specified. --log-level is set on the parent group: turkic-translit --log-level debug translit ....

Tokenizer training

turkic-build-spm --input corpora/kk_lat.txt,corpora/ky_lat.txt \
    --model_prefix spm/turkic12k --vocab_size 12000

Filtering Russian tokens

cat uz_raw.txt | turkic-filter-russian --mode drop > uz_clean.txt

Project Organization

• src/turkic_translit/ — core package (core.py, transliterate.py, rules/, cli/, web/, lm/, language-ID and filtering modules)
• data/ — sample data and language resources
• docs/ — documentation and guides
• scripts/ — dev + release utilities (setup_dev.py, run.ps1, release/)
• tests/ — test suite (per-language IPA coverage for all supported languages)
• cronjob/ — scheduled-task assets for the hosted demo
• app.py — Hugging Face Space entry point for the web UI

FastText language-identification model

Russian-token filtering and language detection use FastText's lid.176.bin. The model is not committed (too large); it is downloaded automatically from the official Facebook AI link on first use and cached in the package directory — no manual step needed for pip installs, Hugging Face Spaces, or CI. Manual source if needed: https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fasttext/supervised-models/lid.176.bin

Logging & error reporting

Central logging supports structured JSON with correlation IDs. Control with TURKIC_LOG_LEVEL (DEBUG…ERROR) and TURKIC_LOG_FORMAT=json|rich (default json); libraries can call turkic_translit.logging_config.setup(). Optional Sentry integration via TURKIC_SENTRY_DSN (+ TURKIC_ENV, TURKIC_SENTRY_TRACES); install with pip install turkic-translit[sentry].

All I/O is UTF-8; on Windows a BOM is written when piping to files to avoid encoding issues.

Relationship to the LSTM project

This repo is the upstream data pipeline for the Turkic mutual-intelligibility LSTM experiments (github.com/wagner-austin/LSTM): turkic-download-corpus plus the IPA transliteration rules produce the per-language IPA corpora that project trains on.

License

Apache-2.0